II

The Members of the Church Here on Earth
Are All Sinners and the
Church Herself Is Without Sin

1. I do not speak here of the Church of heaven, but of the Church in
pilgrimage on the earth. Except for the Virgin Mary, who up until her
Assumption was a part of the Church of the earth, it is a fact that the
members of the Church here on earth are all sinners. A few words first
of all on this point.

Sons of Adam, they are all born deprived of grace, and it is in a human
nature inclined to evil that at Baptism they have received the latter;
they all bear in them the wounds of the first sin. They sin very
frequently in a more or less slight manner, in many cases themselves
because they have neglected to purify their heart.

The sins of which each day the priest and the faithful accuse
themselves at the beginning of Mass, -- "I have sinned through my own
fault, in my thought and in my words, in what I have done, and in what
I have failed to do," -- do not prevent them from receiving the Body of
Christ less than a half-hour after this avowal. They are sinners, yes:
they sin each day through human weakness; and if it happens that they
have sinned gravely they have had recourse to the Sacrament of Penance
and have received absolution. They have habitually grace and charity.

And there are other members of the Church (they have received Baptism,
which has imprinted in them -- as has Confirmation, -- an indelible "character," and they have kept the faith)
who live in evil and who have lost grace and charity, I say before the
gaze of God, Who alone knows the bottom of hearts. One calls them
because of this "dead" members. I don't care much for this word: for
in fact, as I will indicate further on, they remain worked by ferments
of life{1}.

Let us call them nevertheless, because the word is convenient, "dead"
members. And let us say that in the reality of existence all the
members of the Church here on earth, "living" members or "dead"
members, are sinners, -- more or less sinners; and that it is always to
be feared that the best Christian will yield one day to temptation, and
will slip away from grace, and even perhaps will install himself in a
life of grave sin; just as it is always to be hoped that the worst
rogue will turn indeed some day and will return to God, and will die
perhaps as a saint.

2. On an entirely different plane, it is necessary to say also that in
the consciousness that man has of himself, the more exalted a soul is
in grace the more it feels itself a sinner, because then it knows a
little, as its Master knew to perfection, "that which is in man." If
the saints accuse themselves thus, it is less by moral scruple than by
a crushing ontological view of human fragility in the face of the
inscrutable grandeur and beauty of God,(2} and of the abyss of
sufferings into which Mercy caused His Son to enter in order to save
us.

And when they think of all the gifts which they have received without
having merited them and which they have caused to bear so little fruit,
and of the misery which remains in them, they are perhaps not wrong to
put themselves below the great sinners for whom they pray, poor
assassin gangsters and poor sordid prostitutes, or even poor rich men
who feed their fortune and their mistresses with the blood of the
starving, or even poor ones suffering from delusions of empire or of
revolution who establish their power on mountains of corpses. The
saints do not doubt that all of these habitués of evil are
indeed their brothers.

For the consciousness that the sinner has of himself it is quite
otherwise. He seeks to justify himself in his own eyes, or at least to
find some means of accepting himself without repenting. He does this
in many ways. As the Russian writers have admirably seen, and
Dostoevsky above all, there are some who say to themselves: "I am a
scoundrel, I wallow in the mud," with tears of pity for themselves, of
indulgence and of resignation, and not without
counting also on divine mercy. There are others who, while keeping the
faith, say "I am right to live as I do, and I am proud of myself, it is
the morality of the priests which spoils everything by imposing the
impossible . . . ."

As for the non-Christians of our occidental civilization, they
doubtless do not have the sense of sin, but they know what remorse is,
and this is enough in order to destroy a man. How to find an alibi?
The whole question is to save my pride by accusing things, for it is in
them, is it not, not in me that vice is. In order to disclose the
latter, philosophy is fortunately there, with its discoveries and the
new pictures of the world and of the human condition that it reveals to
us. Room then for the thinkers who tell us that the sole hope is in the
creative power of man, and who deny God because there is evil on the
earth. These people think still that if the God of heaven existed, it
would be good; and they attach themselves still in some measure, Marx
for example, to the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage. And room
finally for other thinkers who have completely broken with this
cultural heritage, and who tell us to despair of man as of God. These
people announce the death of God, -- and the death of man, -- while
dreaming of the superman with Nietzche, the greatest among them, or
while offering like Freud a therapeutics to the depraved animal that we
are.

3. What is a modern Catholic going to do after this who is filled with
good will and the desire to show himself fully of his time, as
if it had not been said: nolite conformari huic saeculo? He will
think that the moment has come to change everything radically. It
belongs to us therefore, and to him for his part, to work to renew the
faith. The old Church is dead or dying by dint of having been soiled
by history: it belongs to us to make another. We understand now that
if the transcendent God existed, -- the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of
Jacob, the one Whom Jesus called the heavenly Father (unfortunate
expression, due to the ignorance of the antipaternal complex), -- this
God of heaven would alienate us from ourselves and would be for us worse
than evil: it belongs to us to cause to be the God required by the man
not alienated from himself and by the religion of pure exaltation which
is his, God of the earth only, inviscerated in the visible and living
force in us of the world in evolution.

These thinkers are Christians (neo-Christians), who think that they
have received for today the mission of prophets. There are
perhaps saints among them (man is such a bizarre animal), saints whose
hearts would have caused them to lose their heads. The fact remains
that to tell the truth the integral transformation of all the values
preached by them is a dream of an adolescent sick with desires, and
that they themselves are passing through a serious crisis of
intellectual puberty which runs the risk of tiring them for a long
time, although these crises are transitory by nature.

Be that as it may, one can ask oneself what becomes, in the
consciousness that they have of themselves, of that profound feeling of
being sinner, ashes and dust, which for centuries has inhabited the
soul of the Christian. Be careful, they say to themselves, beware of
the guilt complex! They know well, assuredly, that they are fallible
like every human being. But there where there is no longer the sense
of the infinite transcendence and of the infinite goodness of the All
Holy One, it is inevitable that the authentic sense of sin will become
blunted, -- which has nothing to do with the guilt complex, for it
allies itself with the joy (sacred) of deliverance and of salvation,
with peace of the heart and confidence in limitless Mercy, -- and which
causes man to see his own truth, and the menace, inherent in all the
fibers of his being, of the nothingness from which he has been drawn,
and into which he can at each instant, through the liberty which is his
admirable privilege, proceed morally to lose himself, but from which
there suffices, in order to be drawn from it again, an act of this same
liberty turning itself toward God.

How would the authentic sense of sin of which I have just spoken not be
greatly blunted in our new prophets? It is doubtless because in the
new teaching distributed by the clergy one speaks less and less of sin,
instead of showing better that which it is truly, that many Christians
who in a world more and more inhuman believe themselves made only in
order to be more and more proud of being men regard recourse to the
Sacrament of Penance as an irksome and superfluous drudgery.{3}

* * *

4. Composed of members who are all sinners, and who all bear in
themselves the wounds of original sin, the Church herself, holy and
immaculate, without stain, "indefectibly holy,"{4} is pure of all
trace of sin. To state such a paradox is to say that the Church is
essentially different from all the great human families or communities,
temporal or spiritual, which we know, and that she possesses in comparison with them a privilege absolutely unique. If
she is completely human, she is also completely elevated to a divine
life which she is commissioned to communicate to us.

In the Apostles' Creed it is said that we believe "in Deum Patrem
omnipotentem," and "in Jesum Christum," and "in Spiritum
Sanctum," whereas for the Church (as also for the remission of sins,
the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life) the preposition
in is omitted. We believe "sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam," --
or, in the French translation (I refer here to the Profession of Faith
of Paul VI): we believe "à l'Eglise une, sainte,
catholique et apostolique." God, we "croyons en" Him, because
He is the author of being and the author of salvation, and because into
the uncreated abyss of his Truth and of his Goodness we cast our whole
being, our intelligence and our love, in other words because we adore
Him. The Church, we do not adore her, and therefore do not believe
"en" her, but "à" her, because she is created, and
a divine gift made to the universe of the created. (And likewise are
gifts made to the creature: the remission of sins, the resurrection of
the dead, and eternal life). But the difference of the prepositions
en and à{5} does not signify in any way that the
Church would be a thing purely and simply human, not implying in its
being participation in the very life of God. (Would the remission of
sins, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life be likewise things
purely human and natural?) The Church, who proposes to us by her
teaching all that which God has revealed, and who perpetuates here on
earth by the Mass the sacrifice of Christ, and who sanctifies us by her
Sacraments, belongs essentially to the supernatural order, and she is
herself a mystery of faith, as I have already noted.

In order to aid us to acquire some understanding of this mystery, I do
not know a better guide than Cardinal Journet.{6} For more than fifty
years it has been he who has been my master in the matter. And if in
such a long protracted meditation it happens to me to depart from him
on some point, -- as this happens to me also for the Angelic Doctor --
it is in feeling myself his disciple more profoundly and more truly (a
true disciple is a free disciple, is he not?).

5. Every living being, here on earth, has a soul which is the principle
of its life, and a body in which and by the activities of which this
life manifests itself visibly. Of the life of every living being,
especially of the human being, we have thus external signs:
in itself, -- or insofar precisely as immanent activity operating in
the depths of the body, and, in man, of the spirit also, -- this life
is invisible, like the soul from which it proceeds.

It is the same for the Church. Her uncreated soul is the Holy Spirit,
who, as the second Council of the Vatican says, dwells in the Church
and in the hearts of the faithful as in a Temple,{7} and "by the power
of the Gospel, rejuvenates the Church and renews her perpetually,"{8}
so that "the holy Fathers were able to compare her role to that which
the principle of life, that is to say the soul exercises in the human
body."{9}

But the Church has also, she, this great and mysterious human Figure,
peregrinating under our eyes from century to century, a created
soul{10} -- and a created life -- which she receives supernaturally
from God and which are sanctifying grace ("entitative habitus") and
charity ("operative habitus," as the jargon of the philosophers and of
the theologians says). The soul and the life of the Church are grace
and charity, which are realities invisible in themselves. There where
grace and charity are, there there is the life of the Church, and there
passes the Blood of Christ. There where grace and charity are not,
there there does not pass either the Blood of Christ. To the extent
that a man who has been baptized in the Church sins, to that extent he
slips away from the life of the Church; if he installs himself in the
state of sin (while keeping the faith, which without charity is itself
"dead faith") he remains still a member of the Church, but then the
life of the latter no longer passes in him. To the extent that he
lives by grace and by charity, he lives also by the life of the Whole
of which he is a member, and which is the mystical Body of Christ and
the Bride of Christ.

All contradiction is therefore lifted from the moment one understands
that, on the one hand, the Church herself is without sin because
her own life is grace and charity, -- in their plenitude, I shall return
to this point further on, -- and that, on the other hand, each of her
members is sinner in the measure in which, in slipping away from
grace, he slips away at the same stroke from the life of the Whole of
which he is a member.

6. This is true, although in a manner essentially different, of the
"living" members of the Church and of her "dead" members.

With regard to the "living" members, the part of evil in them remains
greater than it could seem at first sight.

In man, indeed, there is not to be considered only moral evil
properly so-called, -- moral evil of free will, -- but also that which
one can call moral evil of nature, I mean by this the bad dispositions
or inclinations for which we are not responsible -- they come to us
from Adam and from our personal heredity -- and of which we are
generally not conscious, they are as hidden to our own eyes as they are
apparent to the eyes of the neighbor. Now in the "living" members of
the Church these defects or failings of nature are there, coexisting
with grace and charity, -- below them if I may say, as the dregs at the
bottom of a vase of some precious liquor which has not been decanted:
self-respect, inferiority-complex or superiority-complex, obscure need
to be recognized by another, and to please him, or obscure need to
dominate him, and aggressiveness which impels one to blacken him in our
judgments, morbid sensitiveness, etc. All of this can doubtless cause
at some moment a "living"member of the Church to fall into sin, but
much more often preys upon, while warping it, the good which is in him
and which gives its fruits along the whole course of his existence.
From the subterranean empire exercised by all of this many will deliver
themselves little by little by dint of progressing in charity, and also
by the effect of frequent Holy Communion; only the saints are
almost liberated from it. Meanwhile, and as long as all of this
has not been burned by charity, all that which in the "living" members
of the Church proceeds from such failings of nature and spoils more or
less the good which they do, is something which withdraws itself to
this extent from the grace and from the charity which are in them, and
at the same stroke slips away from the life of the Whole of which they
are members, from the proper life of the Body of Christ passing in its
members in the state of grace.{11}

As concerns after this the "dead" members, it is the part of the good
that we risk not recognizing in them. It remains much greater than the
word "dead" suggests.

First because if human nature is wounded since the Fall, in itself
however it has been created good and keeps a fundamental goodness.
What reserves of goodness and of generosity remain in those who have
abandoned God and despair of themselves, and can at certain moments
surprise us by profound movements of the soul and acts singularly
beautiful! These interior movements and these acts are of the merely
natural order, without doubt. And the life of the Church, which is
supernatural grace and supernatural charity, does not at all pass by
them, although however, if the souls in question belong to the Church
by the baptismal character
and by faith, the purely natural good at work in them belongs like them
to the Church and is a part of her treasure.

But there is much more still: I am thinking of all the holy things,
and depending on divine charity in our regard, which remain still in
them: faith first, if these sinners have kept it and are still by this
members of the Church. And theological hope, if they have kept it
also. And as long as the heart is not hardened, sorrow for having
sinned. And the prayer which suddenly rises to the lips of him who
thought he had forgotten it. And then the actual graces which they
receive at certain moments and which sometimes slip perhaps into the
great movements of the soul, natural in themselves, of which I first
spoke. I am thinking also of the traces left by the grace which one
has betrayed, and of the ambivalence of the effects which they produce:
now remembrance, regret, nostalgia, now resentment which turns to hatred
of this God and of this Church against the hidden attraction of whom
one defends oneself (we know that hatred is sometimes an inversion of
love, rage against that which one has loved and which one would like
still to be able to love), And I am thinking above all of the secret
pressure exercised by the collective charity and the collective prayer
of the Church and of her saints, interceding unceasingly on behalf of
all men, and especially of sinners.

7. It seems to me that after having meditated a little on all these
things, one is ready to grasp, in its eminently realist truth, that
which I consider to be the central intuition of Cardinal Journet
concerning the "proper frontiers" of the Church, considered in her
created soul and her life (sanctifying grace and charity) as in her
uncreated Soul, which is the Holy Spirit. "These frontiers," he
writes, "precise and real, circumscribe only that which is pure and
good in her members, just ones and sinners, taking within her all that
which is holy, even in the sinners, leaving outside her all that which
is impure, even in the just; it is in our own behavior, in our own
life, in our own heart that the Church and the world, Christ and
Belial, light and darkness confront one another. The total Christ,
Head and Body, is holy in all His members, sinners and just, drawing to
Him all holiness, even that of His sinful members, rejecting from Him
all impurity, even that of His just members."{12} It is thus that the
Spouse of Christ is "wholly resplendent, without stain or wrinkle or
anything of that sort, but holy and immaculate, sancta et
immaculata."

"The frontier of the Church passes through our own
hearts."{13} "The Church divides in us good and evil. She retains the
good and leaves the evil. Her frontiers pass though our hearts."{14}
Here we have the words which illuminate everything, and they refer to
the secret of the hearts.

8. Here we are in the presence of the great question of the personality
of the Church, that is to say at the very heart of the mystery of the
Church. One understands nothing of this mystery if one does not
discern in it above all the mystery of the person of the universal
Church, Una, Sancta, Catholica, Apostolica, who transcends the
persons of her members, who are all sinners, whereas her own person is
holy and immaculate. The Catholica, as St Augustine liked to
say, the Church considered in her universality and her unity as to her
invisible soul and her visible body at one and the same time, has a
personality distinct from that of the members who compose her, and
insofar precisely as Church she is a person. In order to convince
oneself of this it suffices to read St. Paul, who speaks always of her
as of a person.

It is this that I am going to venture to consider more closely,
instructed by theology, but faithful to the proper concerns of the
philosopher, I say of the Christian philosopher.

{1} One is no longer a member of the Church if one has not kept the
faith. (Cf. Ch. Journet, L'Eglise du Verbe Incarné, t. II,
pp. 1056-1081.) Whoever has lost grace and charity is a "dead" member,
and his faith is "dead" also (as to eternal life). In itself it is
however always a gift of the supernatural order, so that such members
"receive still from Christ a certain act of life, which is to believe"
(Sum. theol., III, q. 8, a. 3, ad 2).

{2} "The saint does not place himself in the perspective of an ideal of
perfection proposed to his effort, in order to measure afterwards
whether he has come near to it or even whether he has accepted it. The
misery with which he groans and which is revealed to him in the light
in which he perceives -- however confusedly this may be -- the divine
transcendence, is not
that of his virtue, nor even of his intention. More profoundly and
more absolutely it is the misery of his being, not by way of abstract
or metaphysical knowledge, but by way of vital reaction before the
Presence of the divine Being." (Dom Pierre Doyère, Introduction
to Héraut de l'Amour divin, t. 2 of Oeuvres
Spirituelles of St. Gertrude, Paris, éd. du Cerf, 1968, pp.
39-40.)

{3} I add however that for the aversion today evident toward the use of
the laughably sinister piece of furniture called 'Confessional' there
is an altogether different reason. I believe that those who -- very
justly -- held frequent Confession to be a normal custom in the
spiritual life felt more and more painfully the discordance between the
idea that the sin of the world caused God to die on the Cross and the
weekly drawing up of a list of current faults, always identical, to be
confessed without forgetting anything, which resembles a little too
much a list of provisions to be bought at the market. Would it not be
desirable that all these sins always the same become the object of a
formula of confession periodically recited by the community, and
followed by a public absolution, -- private Confession being reserved
for the sins which really torment the soul of the penitent?

{5} One will note that in the Oriental form of the Apostles' Creed (St.
Cyril of Jerusalem) the same preposition eis is employed for the
Church as for God. (Cf. Denz.-Schön., 41.)

If one does not give to "croire en" the eminent sense of manifesting
adoration, but the current sense in French of adhering fully without
seeing (to the truths revealed by God), I think that the Greek use is
preferable, and that it is better to say "je crois en" all through the
Credo. This is moreover what one does now in the missals in French.

In his beautiful book La Foi Chrétienne (Paris, Aubier,
1969) Father de Lubac brings strongly to light the difference between
"credere in" and "credere" followed only by the accusative. But in
order to justify the use, in the French language, of "je crois en
Dieu," one can argue from the remarkable chapter (Ch. VIII) of the same
work, where the author shows that the radical novelty of the Christian
message has obliged one to do violence to the Latin language, to the
point of cramping exceedingly the Ciceronianism of St. Jerome and of
St. Augustine. Introduced forcibly by the Christian faith in the three
divine Persons, "credere in" is a solecism in Latin. But this is in
nowise the case for "croire en" in our language. We say "je crois en la
dignité de l'homme" as we say "je crois en Dieu." "Croire en" is
not an unusual grammatical form, introduced forcibly into French in
order to connote the idea of adoration. Where one expresses oneself in
French, there is no reason not to say "je crois en l'Eglise."

The Holy Spirit is the Soul of the Church because He is the first
principle of her life, dwells in the depth of the hearts of her
"living" members, inspires and directs -- He, the Spirit of Christ --
the behavior of this great Body through human history. But it is in a
hyperbolical sense that He is thus the uncreated
soul of the Church. It is clear, indeed, that He cannot inform the
body of the Church in the manner, however analogical it may be, in
which the soul informs the body, or be a part of the ontological
structure of anything merely created. (In the hypostatic union, in
which the Person of the Word has assumed a human nature, Christ is not
purus homo. And the Church is not God, as Christ is.)

This is why we must recognize in the Church, as Cardinal Journet does,
a soul which is created as she is, and which informs her body in the
manner -- analogical -- in which the soul of a living being informs the
body of the latter. Considered in its nucleus, this created soul of the
Church is, Charles Journet tells us (L'Église du Verbe
Incarné, t. II, p. 613). "the capital grace of Christ
unifying in it the triple privilege of His priesthood, of His holiness,
of His kingship"; considered in its blossoming forth in the Church, it
is (ibid., p. 646) "charity insofar as related to worship,
sacramental and orientated."

But desiring (without succeeding always) to employ in this book the
least technical language possible, I think it preferable to say simply
that the created soul of the Church is the grace of Christ; for
grace is a divine gift (created) which perfects our soul and invests it
with a new nature, and it is from it that charity proceeds, which
perfects our will and our action, so that one can regard it as the very
life of the Church. These two notions of grace and of charity are so
closely related that it is normal to join them by saying that grace and
charity are the soul and the life of the Church.

{11} Grace is given by God directly to whoever receives it, in a
relation of Person to person. But the. grace received by each is one of
the constituent parts of that pleroma of all graces which is the soul
of the Church, so that whoever lives by the grace of Christ lives, by
that very fact, by the soul of the Church. (Cf. further on, Ch. X, pp.
102-103, 104-106 and note 27).

{12}Théologie de l'Eglise, p. 244. "It is true," the
author continues, "that Apostolic men could complain loudly to the bad
Christians that they were staining the Church. We think however that
their intention was less at that time to defend the theological thesis
of the Church stained by the stains of her members, than to cause
Christians to understand that they belong de jure wholly to the
Church (which is true), that the world will hold her responsible for
their lapses (this also is true but it is an injustice) and that in
this sense they stain her in staining themselves."